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It had been my intention to live in the priest’s
house, but a short interview with him on the following
day convinced me that that part of my plan could not
be carried out. The preliminary objections that
I should find but poor fare in his humble household,
and much more of the same kind, were at once put aside
by my assurance, made partly by pantomime, that, as
an old traveller, I was well accustomed to simple
fare, and could always accommodate myself to the habits
of people among whom my lot happened to be cast.
But there was a more serious difficulty. The
priest’s family had, as is generally the case
with priests’ families, been rapidly increasing
during the last few years, and his house had not been
growing with equal rapidity. The natural consequence
of this was that he had not a room or a bed to spare.
The little room which he had formerly kept for occasional
visitors was now occupied by his eldest daughter,
who had returned from a “school for the daughters
of the clergy,” where she had been for the last
two years. Under these circumstances, I was constrained
to accept the kind proposal made to me by the representative
of my absent friend, that I should take up my quarters
in one of the numerous unoccupied rooms in the manor-house.
This arrangement, I was reminded, would not at all
interfere with my proposed studies, for the priest
lived close at hand, and I might spend with him as
much time as I liked.

And now let me introduce the reader to my reverend
teacher and one or two other personages whose acquaintance
I made during my voluntary exile.

CHAPTER III

VOLUNTARY EXILE

Ivanofka—­History of the Place—­The
Steward of the Estate—­Slav and Teutonic
Natures—­A German’s View of the Emancipation—­Justices
of the Peace—­New School of Morals—­The
Russian Language—­Linguistic Talent of the
Russians—­My Teacher—­A Big Dose
of Current History.

This village, Ivanofka by name, in which I proposed
to spend some months, was rather more picturesque
than villages in these northern forests commonly are.
The peasants’ huts, built on both sides of a
straight road, were colourless enough, and the big
church, with its five pear-shaped cupolas rising out
of the bright green roof and its ugly belfry in the
Renaissance style, was not by any means beautiful in
itself; but when seen from a little distance, especially
in the soft evening twilight, the whole might have
been made the subject of a very pleasing picture.
From the point that a landscape-painter would naturally
have chosen, the foreground was formed by a meadow,
through which flowed sluggishly a meandering stream.
On a bit of rising ground to the right, and half concealed
by an intervening cluster of old rich-coloured pines,
stood the manor-house—­a big, box-shaped,
whitewashed building, with a verandah in front, overlooking
a small plot that might some day become a flower-garden.